Learning to play a musical instrument is a complex and challenging task. In addition to the physical coordination required to play the instrument, a student must learn to visualize in his/her mind the note or pattern of notes that comprise a piece of music he/she wants to hear, the note""s or pattern of notes"" representation on paper as a musical score and how the notes or pattern of notes are played on the instrument. Furthermore, music includes complex concepts, for example, melody, rhythm tempo and harmony. Consequently, most music lessons are conducted in person or with the student and teacher able to interact in real time so that the teacher can revise the lesson to focus on the part of the lesson the student finds difficult.
With a computer and a communications network, such as the Internet, a teacher can provide musical lessons to many students inexpensively. Although use of a computer and a communications network allows the teacher and student to interact in real or substantially real time, the software the teacher typically uses to create a digital file of the music lesson does not permit the teacher to quickly and easily revise and archive the visual and/or audio content of the lesson. Thus, when a student asks a question about improvising, a teacher""s explanation of harmony and improvising in key is largely limited to explaining the concepts with a message in text, a spoken message, or a video of the teacher playing his/her musical instrument.
Thus there is a need for providing musical lessons over a communications network that allows the teacher to quickly and easily revise and archive the visual and/or audio content of the lesson in real or substantially real time and archive.
The present invention provides systems and methods for creating, revising and providing a music lesson over a communications network. The system comprises a teacher station controlled by a teacher and one or more student stations each controlled by a student. These stations can be connected directly to each other over a communication network or they can each be connected to an administrative station that facilitates the transfer of a lesson file over a communications network. The teacher station comprises a computer and a lesson creator/reviser program that is executable by the computer and can generate a digital lesson file representing the audio and visual content of a music lesson. The lesson creator/reviser program comprises various modules that receive the audio and/or visual lesson content and correspondingly generate sub-files that form the lesson file. More specifically, the lesson creator/reviser program comprises a syncedit module that simultaneously receives digital audio data and MIDI data representing a note or notes played by the teacher with his/her instrument. From the MIDI data, the syncedit module generates dynamic visual display data of the note or notes and can play the digital audio data and display the dynamic visual display data in sync with each other. Furthermore, the syncedit allows the teacher to quickly and easily revise the visual display so that the teacher can more easily explain complex musical concepts in real or substantially real time.
The student station comprises a computer and a lesson viewer program that is executable by the computer and can display the audio and visual content represented by the digital lesson file created by the lesson creator/reviser program. The lesson viewer program comprises various modules that receive respective sub-files of the digital lesson file and play and/or display the lesson content represented by each sub-file. More specifically, the lesson viewer program comprises an audio-notation viewer module that can play the digital audio data and display the dynamic visual display data generated by the syncedit module in sync with each other to show the student the note or notes being played as the student hears the note or notes.
In one aspect of the invention, the syncedit module allows the teacher to overlay a scale of the key of the lesson content heard and dynamically displayed onto the dynamic visual display of the music. In addition, the syncedit module allows the teacher to visually indicate when music changes key and the key the music changed to. Other types of revisions the syncedit module can allow the teacher to make include visually representing a note as a circle with a number in it or as the note""s name, for example, A, A#, C, C#; adding visual representations of additional notes to indicate an arpeggio; and selecting and/or deleting portions of the digital display data.
In another aspect of the invention, the syncedit module can generate a dynamic visual display in the form of tabulature notation, staff notation, an image of a virtual instrument, an image of the audio content on a time verses decibel scale or any combination of these. Furthermore, the audio-notation viewer module of the lesson viewer program can display the dynamic visual display data in the form of tabulature notation, staff notation, an image of a virtual instrument or any combination of these.
In still another aspect of the invention, the lesson creator/reviser program can include a tabedit module that can generate and revise a dynamic visual display in the same way the syncedit module does but can display the dynamic visual display using more than one line. Thus, lengthy pieces of music can be dynamically visually displayed for the benefit of the student.